“From
time immemorial the wheel has been a symbol of power and the man in the street
has cringed before its awful implications. The ‘man on horseback’ occasionally
dismounted, but it was only to enter a wheeled vehicle whose distinction or
magnificence or actual power of destruction set him apart from the common herd
of men.
“The
modern scene has worked certain changes in the average man’s attitude toward
the wheel. Its functions have become enlarged and more democratic. It is now a
symbol of individual achievement as well as of inherited power. The
automobile-owner lords it over the pedestrian and the latter, by the mechanical
exigencies of a machine society, is made to feel his inferiority at every step.
In certain precariously balanced minds it is a short flight from this point to actual
dromophobia, in which the victim sees the locomotive, the motor-car, the
surface-car, any wheeled vehicle, in fact, as an animated killer, a modern
demon of destruction resurrected out of the twilight of the ancient world to
accomplish his destruction. To the ineffectual, the attribute of movement
becomes a symbol of the achievement; to the impotent, a manifesto of power; and
to the sexually impotent, the motor-car may be a phallic symbol – the personification
of the quality he lacks and which he hates and fears in others. (Conversely, we
find cases of the small, sexually weak man who bravely struts in the face of
the traffic maze, thus finding the compensation he needs for his own
inadequacy.) The dromophobic dreads the moment when he must emerge into the
street. He postpones it, second by second, inventing reason after plausible
reason to reassure himself, to rationalize his own panic. And when at last he
nerves himself for the necessary plunge, he goes in the absolute conviction
that he will never live to see the other side of the street.”
John Vassos
New York City
May 25th, 1931
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